New posts from thoughtshrapnel.com
Thought Shrapnel
An 'anti-social network' you post to via email subject lines
On the one hand, this is awesome. On the other, what would I use it for?
Mine’s here. Don’t expect much! I think if I wanted something like this I’d probably use telegra.ph instead. Although it does give off a Posterous vibe from ~15 years ago. (I see Posthaven still exists!)
Daft Social lets you post and share notes, links or images by email subject only. From any email account.
Source: Daft Social
Shared persuasion tactics
I feel like this fits well with some stuff WAO has been revisiting this week around challenger brands and crafting messages for specific audiences.
The same forces that are driving the rise of populism in politics are also used by startups to grow their business.
Here’s are political strategies that businesses use to grow:
- The power of the outsider narrative
- Single issue voters
- Grassroots Mobilisation
- Narrative Control and Messaging
- Building Alliances and Partnerships
- Segmentation and Targeting
[…]
The key takeaway is that inspiration can be drawn from the most unexpected places. From modern politics and entrepreneurship, there’s always something new to learn, adapt, and apply to your own endeavours.
Source: The shared persuasion tactics of politics and startups
Doing something about the UK schooling class divide
In the UK, prices of family-sized homes are closely linked to the Ofsted rating of local schools. This leads to segregation based on ability to pay. As people who are in favour of private schools have told me, this means that any arguments I make against paying for education are a bit hypocritical.
My kids have had a much better schooling and in a safer area than I grew up in. Every parent wants this for their children. But by segregating schooling based on income, we turn it into a game that middle class parents play to win.
So what’s being proposed in Brighton is huge: essentially de-coupling house prices from school admissions. I hope that it takes off, and it becomes the norm. It takes a while to see and feel the class system in England in particular. But once you do, you can’t avoid the systemic injustice of it all.
As any estate agent knows, a school judged outstanding by Ofsted will push up neighbouring property prices. This is a cruel system that drives families who can afford it to uproot themselves, makes many of those who cannot feel inadequate, and produces and intensifies social segregation.
Few would dispute this account. Not the government, which has published papers on the link between house prices and schools, nor academics or analysts: just last week the Sutton Trust published findings showing that 155 comprehensives, supposedly open to all, are more socially selective than a typical grammar. In Scotland, home addresses are assigned one secondary school so that, as the Institute for Fiscal Studies points out, social segregation there is even more marked.
Rarely does any of this feature in the discussion around raising school standards. Ministers and policy experts talk about Sats, school curricula, inspections – rather than bringing down the invisible barriers that go up for children as early as five. Which is why Brighton and Hove is worth watching. On Monday, its Labour-led council will vote to change secondary school admissions. Councillors propose to make local authority secondaries give priority to children on free school meals over pupils from the catchment area. Observers believe that Brighton and Hove will be the first council ever to do this. The move is an attempt to reduce inequality within a highly unequal city, to mix up school populations, and to give pupils access to sought‑after schools. For a city that prides itself on being progressive and inclusive, this is a big step towards living those values.
Source: The Guardian view on school reform: southern discomfort about the class divide | The Guardian
Image: CC BY-ND Visual Thinkery
Preparing for a year of electoral disinformation
I listened to an interesting episode of the Your Undivided Attention podcast a few days ago which approached questions around AI from the perspective of myth.
One of the points that was made was that we’ve lost the ability for councils of elders to stop things from happening because it’s likely to be dangerous for community cohesion. Now it’s “move fast and break things”. With AI the ‘things’ could be democracy, civilization, or perhaps even the planet.
The token gestures discussed in this article from companies like OpenAI are like spitting in the wind. I mean, it’s great that people can’t just ask ChatGPT to create something impersonating a politician, and that images will be watermarked as generated by AI. But even I wouldn’t find it that hard to generate reasonably-convincing deepfakes given available tools.
As I’ve found through work I’ve done on disinformation, people are looking for content which confirms their existing beliefs. This means that you don’t have to create things that are particularly sophisticated for disinformation to go viral. And then by the time it’s debunked, more stuff has come out. It’s a game of whack-a-mole, except (to extend the metaphor) the moles have the potential to explode.
Yesterday TikTok presented me with what appeared to be a deepfake of Timothee Chalamet sitting in Leonardo Dicaprio’s lap and yes, I did immediately think “if this stupid video is that good imagine how bad the election misinformation will be.” OpenAI has, by necessity, been thinking about the same thing and today updated its policies to begin to address the issue.
In addition to being firmer in its policies on election misinformation OpenAI also plans to incorporate the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity’s (C2PA) digital credentials into images generated by Dall-E “early this year”. Currently Microsoft, Amazon, Adobe, and Getty are also working with C2PA to combat misinformation through AI image generation.
…Given that AI is itself a rapidly changing tool that regularly surprises us with wonderful poetry and outright lies it’s not clear how well this will work to combat misinformation in the election season. For now your best bet will continue to be embracing media literacy. That means questioning every piece of news or image that seems too good to be true and at least doing a quick Google search if your ChatGPT one turns up something utterly wild.
Source: Here’s OpenAI’s big plan to combat election misinformation | The Verge
The death of consensus reality
I mentioned the podcast Your Undivided Attention in a recent post. Last summer, I listened to an episode featuring Nita Farahany which I thought was excellent. I told everyone about it.
In this interview, Farahany is interviewed alongside Aza Raskin, one of the hosts of Your Undivided Attention. I’ve focused on Raskin’s answers, but you should read the whole thing, alongside listening to the podcast episode. Excellent stuff.
Aza Raskin: I think we can frame social media as “first contact with AI.” Where is AI in social media? Well, it’s a curation AI. It’s choosing which posts, which videos, which audio hits the retinas and eardrums of humanity. And notice, this very unsophisticated kind of AI misaligned with what was best for humanity. Just maximizing for engagement was enough to create this whole slew of terrible outcomes, a world none of us really wants to live in. We see the dysfunction of the U.S. government—at the same time that we have runaway technology we have a walk-away governance system. We have polarization and mental health crises. We don’t know really what’s true or not. We’re all in our own little subgroups. We’ve had the death of a consensus reality, and that was with curation AI—first generation, first contact AI.
We’re now moving into what we call “second contact with AI.” This is creation AI, generative AI. And then the question to ask yourself is, have we fixed the misalignment with the first one? No! So we should expect to see all of those problems just magnified by the power of the new technology 10 times, 100 times, 1,000 times more.
[…]
I think this is the year that I’ve really felt that confusion between “Is it to utopia or dystopia that we go?” And the lesson we can learn from social media is that we can predict the future if you understand the incentives. As Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s business partner, said, “If you show me the incentives, I’ll show you the outcome.” The way we say it is: “If you name the market race people are in, we can name the result.” The race is the result. And Congress is still sort of blind to that. And so we’re stuck in this question of do we get the promise? Do we get the peril? How can we just get the promise without the peril, without an acknowledgment of, well, what’s the incentive? And the incentive is: grow as fast as possible to increase your capabilities, to increase your power so you can make more money and get more compute and hire the best people. Wash, rinse, repeat without an understanding of what are the externalities. And humanity, no doubt, has created incredible technology. But we have yet to figure out a process by which we invent technology that then doesn’t have a worse externality, which we have to invent something new for. And we’re reaching the place where the externality that we create will break the fragile civilization we live in if we don’t get there beforehand.
Source: Social Media, AI, and the Battle for Your Brain | proto.life